My ITERATIVE Process:

I generally understand that not everything comes easily to me. I knew that plasma cutting would take me more than 1 hour. For this reason, I signed up for multiple slots to work with the machine so I could give myself room to complete the assignment. The first thing to figure out was the illustrator file and orientation. Once my partner and I asked for help and utilized similar methods from the laser cutting homework, it worked out well. It was a 3 hour long Tuesday night. My partner was successful, but for some reason, I was not. This was my first file.

I thought I could try to make it work by manually connecting the points of the tree to the edge of the heart. For some reason, the plasma cutter started from the outside and then tried to cut the inside, which was very weird. I even tried my backup file, didn’t work.

 

My next attempt was on Thursday morning. I tried working on it for another 3 hours, a misuse of my time. We were told the machine was broken the day before, but I wanted to just prepare a file nevertheless. I was experiencing other issues. There were two paths in my file in Torchmate ( in addition to the previous problem where the plasma cutter would from the outside and then move in). I made about 4 different files and have many iterations from those. I was not enjoying the process at all. I had a lab assistant with me the whole time. Professor Wettergreen and Douglas fixed it many hours later.

The next time I went into the shop was a week later. I spent about 2 hours there. Joe had just cleaned the plasma cutter and it worked perfectly. I quickly cut out a start file I had saved from prior iterations. I had very minimal slag.

My next steps were to angle grind to get rid of the slag. Essentially,this part was pretty easy and simple.I got the slag off easily.

My only fear was digging too deep into the metal, which only happened slightly to one or two of the four stars. For aesthetic and smoothing purposes, the next step was to use the sandblaster. Unfortunately, the lab assistants discovered that it wasn’t working. Instead, I went down to the wood shop and tried to use the wire brush, orbital sander with a grit size of about 180, and a file in order to accomplish my goal. The next day, I felt like that process would take forever and I was content with the look of my pieces so I moved on to spray paint. I applied this really nice filler primer that did exactly what I wanted.

I could have stopped the finishing here, but I thought of the idea to create a galaxy theme. Then I would vinyl cut out the shape of the star and apply a gold streak. The only trouble was that I did not create a stencil that covered the entire diamond ( mostly because the vinyl cutter was giving me slight trouble ).

I liked the overall design nevertheless. The final product is below.

My Thoughts:

I will never go near the machine again because:

• the plasma cutter machine gives trouble with really intricate, elaborate designs
• the water that sits in the machine is gross ( I suggest wearing gloves to fish your piece out the water)

Useful in some cases because:

• cuts through metal quickly
• cost-effective

 

Cost Analysis:

1 Hot Rolled Steel Sheet 0.75 in thick, 1 x 2 ft  – $15.94

Spray Cans – $5.98/can * 4 colors = $23.92

1 can of Rust-oleaum Filler Primer ~ $6.98

14 piece 12 x 12 inches vinyl sheets  – $7.99

Labor ~ 20 hrs * 7.25/hr =  $145